Well, it's June 14th again. Three full years have moved passed
now since Eric passed away. Plenty has changed and happened, and yet there are
still moments where I wonder if I have moved forward at all. I have never
really shared that he had a heart attack while going through alcohol
withdrawals, unless its been in a face to face conversation. I mention it now
only to note that he had been very sick at the end, and there was a lot of loss
and heartache already engulfing my life. As well as others who loved him. His
brothers, his family, his friends. So the time of loss is really blurred into
closer to 4 or 5 it seems. Say what you will about alcoholism and what you
believe it to be. I know it
to be a beast of a disease. I shared my husband and best friend with this beast
and lost every battle against it, and was left holding very little when it was
said and done. You can fight, pray, beg, detach, yell, hug, walk out, or go on
lock down to make it stop. But all of those efforts feel like throwing balloons
at a brick wall. It is not an easy thing to surrender your life over to
circumstances that you have very little say so in, but I see now that is not
really what was happening.

The reality is our fight with this was for a short period of time in comparison
to what some people experience, and over the years I find myself being more
grateful for that than I ever expected. I know now that I had wild, beautiful,
talented, and loving Eric most. You just always think you are going to have
more time. I think this is true no matter what the case is. Whether it is
sudden, or there are months and years of illness. Will there really ever be a
time where we feel we said all we wanted to? I think we believe we can lessen
the blow of a loss by avoiding, preparing, or working through it. That if we
work hard enough, or are good enough than we will never have to truly
experience it. This is far from the truth. I have also learned that as painful,
and confusing, and devastating as loss can be, it can also be a filled with
lessons that transform. That bring you back to truth. And whether we want to
embrace it—it is an inevitable reality. So I finally decided that trying to
fight or hope to never walk through it was a wasted effort. The past few weeks
I have been anticipating this year mark coming, and have been thinking back on
the last three years. I have written plenty about grief since 2010 and have
shared my days with it whether I wanted to or not. But this year it has felt
less like a roommate, and more like that honest friend that stops in from time
to time. So it feels like it might be time to believe I am past my grieving.
There is a hesitation I have when I say that because I think it might imply
that I am no longer affected by that loss or miss him or love him. This
misunderstanding of what grief really is can be the reason we get stunted by
loss, and allow it to become a hindrance in living rather than what it can
ultimately be. Grieving is the time after a dramatic loss where we are sick and
rebuilding ourselves back, not something that I believe we are meant to stay in
forever. So this year, I felt strongly that I wanted to share my experience
with what grief actually was to me. One, because I don't think we talk about it
enough. And two, because I feel I can actually speak to it with clarity. I hope
it might make someone else feel less alone in their experience. Because I am
hear to say that the space of grief is one of the loneliest places to ever
exist.

I have made a list of a few of the major steps that I experienced. Not like the
5 stages of grief that we all know. But a few more personal things that are
relative to those stages that you might not necessarily find with a quick
Google search. Things maybe I would like to have known walking into this
darkness.

1. There is a fog that rolls in and engulfs you on the other
side of losing someone. I can remember feeling it from the moment I got the
call. This fog is a God-given protective cloud. It is slightly numbing and
turns out, lasts for quite a while. It lifts ever so slightly with each passing
month or year, giving you time to readjust to normalcy. I would look back and
wonder how on Earth I did some of the things I actually did. But could barely
remember taking part in it. I still thank
God for that fog.

2. There was a fear that cleaning out closets, rearranging
furniture, and repainting rooms would cause me to forget Eric, or erase him
from my life. This is a real fear that our brains and hearts tell us is truth.
What I need to say is I had to actively force myself to move forward. We do not
naturally want to do this. I had a complete breakdown the night before my
friend was going to come over and help me repaint, but on the other side of any
guilt and fear was the beginning of healing. You can't see it, or even yet
begin to feel the healing. It is simply having faith that it will be there. I
also need to say that no amount of changed rooms, or bags of clothes given
away, or graduating through phases of grief can ever come close to erasing a
person from your life.

3. I don't remember eating for months. I am sure I did, but I am not sure what.
It would be six months before I actually felt hungry again. This is a real,
physical reaction to loss. I knew this, but what I didn't know was how hungry I
would be. It was terrifying to realize my body had been starving, and I had
been unaware for so long.

4. Another physical reaction is what felt like a huge rock in my throat that
made it difficult to breathe. It was also literally painful. It took me a month
or so to take notice that it was there and had yet to go away. I couldn't sigh
deep enough to release it. It resembles that feeling you might get right before
you need to cry. Only it never went away. It didn't go away for over a year.

5. I had an irrational fear that I would also be
dying soon. I am not sure if this is common, but I believe it probably is. We
just don't talk about it out loud. And this may not be with every death. For
me, I had been married to Eric, so my day-to-day involved him. Sudden death was
everywhere for me. I went through a couple of months where I was frantically
trying to get his affairs in order, as they say, along with mine. So that when
my time came I wouldn't have to leave anyone holding a burden. I told my
parents what they should do with my things, I cleaned out the attic, and
organized rooms and computers. I didn't want to die, I just expected I would.
This is an ugly truth to say out loud, but it felt like truth at one point. One
day it dawned on me that maybe I still had a life in front of me, so I settled
down in this thought. From the outside, maybe it looked like I was trying to
move forward quickly, but really I think his unexpected death unearthed a reality
for me that took me a while to know how to process.

6. There is what is referred to as the year of firsts. I was fortunate to have my therapist inform me of this early on. First holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. Each one is a milestone, and can be difficult. Because I was armed with this information, I was able to actively counteract the flood of sadness that would be part of those days, down to more of a river. They were still hard, but I found that I was able to understand the irrational feelings a bit more. I have learned to make those days important still. Whether I take a day from work and do something I enjoy. Something we might have done together. Or whether I get together with someone else who loved him too. The point being, I found that spending those days in a positive way makes me remember why I wouldn't change a second of my life that involved him.

7. There were moments where I had such clarity about it all. At the risk of
sounding a little crazy, I describe them as feeling like pinholes of peace from
the other side. These moments would almost always be followed by an extreme
low. This would even out over time, and after a while I figured out how to hang
on to some of the clarity about it all during the low moments. This, for me,
essentially came down to having faith in God, and belief that there is in fact
a bigger purpose to all of this. These "pinhole" moments would end up
being one of the biggest things carrying me over the lows.

I essentially went through the majority of my grieving
alone. There really wasn't anyone my age that I knew personally who had lost a
husband. The truth was, I was mad about that for a long time.
Mad I was so alone in it, mad I couldn't just be 30 like everyone else around
me. I missed a lot of the lighter things that one might be doing during this
time—whether it was dating, getting married, having families, or traveling. But
there was clearly another path that God had for me, so after three long years I
am 100% on board with what my life is, and has been. In the meantime, I had my
loving parents and sister, and family, and a whole crowd of friends to lean on.
And as beyond blessed as I am with amazing people who propped me up along the
way, very few could ever completely relate and tell me what to expect. I am
thankful for this fact; I would never want this for my loved ones. But this is
partly why I am sharing all of this, because I am able to. Here is what I want
to tell others, and maybe what I wish I could have told myself in the
beginning:

—You won't move past this quickly. You may feel the expectation
is to be strong and get back to life. You even think it will be within 6
months, a year. It won't be. By about six months or so, the majority of people
around no longer seem to have that on their mind when they think of you. This
is completely natural, but it is okay that it is still all you think of. Our
culture does not like to sit long in sadness or grief, so I think we force
ourselves further along then we need to be. It took me about six months to
finally rebel against any expectations—most I set on myself—and to allow my
days to be consumed by the loss. I finally didn't care that a normal 30 year
old would be doing this or that. I just couldn't. I needed to stay deep inside
the sadness, because I was.

—Don't go on a food cleanse when you are in the depths of a
snowy winter and in the middle of dark sadness. I say this sort of jokingly,
but I did it. Stuck inside a house alone, in the middle of a season I am not
fond of already, and limiting myself in things like food and caffeine was a
rookie mistake. The point is, don't make extreme decisions like that when you
are not 100%. It was this moment when I finally gave into the fact that I was
not actually doing okay. I was not 100%, I was probably not even 50%, and so I
let go of wanting to be further along. And decided to stop and take care of
myself. Even it that meant eating unhealthy comfort foods, or drinking lots and
lots of coffee because I was tired all of the time, or if it meant leaving my
to do list undone.

—Guilt is an ugly thing. It is almost always rooted in
untruth and is unproductive. Find a way to pull yourself out of the guilt and
not take it on as truth. It is technically one of the stages of grief, but in
my experience it showed up in many places. Guilt from things left unsaid, guilt
that I was changing the house too quickly, guilt that I was experiencing things
that he never would. It was there when I had to get a new car. It was there
when I found myself having a good time at a party. Some days it took me down,
other days I quickly handed it over God and chose to believe what I knew was
true.

—Some moments the reality of what has happened will hit you
like a freight train. Out of nowhere. And it can literally take your breath
away. In the beginning it will feel like too much, but the blows lessen over
time. 3 years later they still hit me from time to time, so I can’t speak to if
it ever stops. Just know that it is possible to breathe through those moments
and let them pass over you. I have found that when this happens I immediately
send him love. It helps.

—Don't be so hard yourself. Take time off early on. I was,
and am, terrible with this. I wish I could have told myself that I was going to
completely lose it just right after the first year. Complete melt down! And
still, even then, it didn't occur to me that I needed to step back a bit and
just take some time. I really thought that by the end of the first year I
should have been further along. However, I skipped the anger and depression,
and every time it came up, I pushed it back off. Thinking a week or so would
cover it. Well, it rolled in dark and heavy, just right about the time my
grandmother passed away. And a new year started. It had taken me a year and a half
to finally lose enough to be ready to let it all go. The best thing I can say
about that time is that it was a catalyst for throwing my hands completely in
the air and giving up any ounce of control I thought I had. To finally just
hand it back over to my maker. The transformation that resulted was one of the
biggest reasons I am where I am today.

I don't say all of this on a day like today as a
means to remember Eric's death negatively. I say it because I can stand where I
am on this anniversary of his death and remember vividly so many of these
moments, and know they are not where I am anymore. I want to share it to say
that it is possible to still miss and love a person, and have them continue to
be a part of your being, but also move forward. I would often think
about what he might say to me on those days I wanted to give up. Wanted to stay
stuck in the darkness. It was one thing for him to sit alone in sadness, but
quite another for anyone he loved to do it. I could hear him say "Little,
keep going. Live. Be Bold." As a believer in God and Heaven and Souls, I
have always believed that our loved ones are still with us when they pass. I
can confidently say I know this is truth now. I believe in God's bigger plan
for all of this, and am grateful for every stitch of it. And as much as faith
and support and time pushed me forward, I feel strong in saying that there were
so many moments that I know Eric nudged me forward too. He reminded me of our
truth, not what had been touched by him being sick. He showed up in moments
that became pivotal points for my healing. Of all of the love and laughter and
lessons I learned while we had our time together on Earth, it is the nudge out
of darkness and back to living that I believe he played a role in, for which I
will forever be indebted to him.

"here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope